A hot potato: Since PC gaming went pretty much fully digital many years ago, some console gamers have bragged about their machines’ ability to play physical discs and the advantages that brings. But a new report illustrates how just because a game is on a disc, it doesn’t guarantee you won’t need an internet connection to play it.

From Sony’s decision to end production of discs for new PlayStation games in 2028 to the Xbox network outage that stopped some disc-based titles from working, there’s been a lot of conversation about physical media recently.

One topic revolves around the many discs that don’t work (to different degrees) without an online connection, usually to fix a game-breaking bug. The testers at Does It Play (via Ars Technica) found that most disc games are “plug and play,” but a sizable minority can’t be played as intended straight from the disc.

The results show that 27% of all the physical releases the site has tested require some sort of download to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content not stored on the disc.

On the PS5 specifically, 34% of tested disc releases are not fully playable as intended without a patch. Half are beatable but have serious bugs or are missing content, while the other half require a download to play properly or at all.

It’s a much worse picture on the Xbox Series X. Only 50% of tested physical releases were complete and playable as intended from the disc. Another 12% could be beaten but were too buggy or missing content, leaving 38% that required some form of download.

Those Xbox results come from just 78 entries, compared with 792 for the PS5, so the difference should be treated cautiously. The Nintendo Switch 2 performed better, with 75% of its tested releases complete and beatable without a download, although its sample was even smaller at 48 entries.

Reliance on downloads weakens what was once physical media’s biggest selling point: long-term access. Once servers close, missing files and essential patches may become impossible to obtain, creating a major problem for preservation. Then there are players who buy a game requiring a download but have no internet connection to obtain it.

Physical copies still offer advantages, of course. They can be resold, lent to friends, and are often much cheaper than digital versions. It was recently reported that some physical PlayStation games cost up to 90% less than their digital counterparts.

But as the recent Xbox outage demonstrated, owning a disc doesn’t always protect players from server failures. Microsoft said disc-based entitlement checks should not have blocked games and is preparing a fix, though it still hasn’t fully explained why some valid discs failed.

Given a rising number of publishing misconduct allegations, IEEE in 2022 created the Publishing Ethics Team as a centralized department to assist in handling claims. The group also works to increase the organization’s visibility in the broader publishing ethics area and helps IEEE volunteers write new policies.

Here are some highlights of the team’s activities last year.

New detection tools

IEEE conducted a pilot program in 2024 to integrate tools from the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) Integrity Hub into the peer-review workflow of IEEE Access. The multidisciplinary, fully gold-open-access journal publishes research results across all IEEE fields of interest.

STM created the hub so scholarly publishers could access a suite of integrated, commercial, third-party research integrity tools as well as those developed by STM Solutions. The tools help the publishing group avoid printing problematic content upon manuscript receipt, rather than reacting postpublication.

The new features include the Clear Skies Papermill Alarm, which helps identify potentially fraudulent manuscripts at submission. Another is an integration with the PubPeer database, which allows users to check whether references in a manuscript have received previous PubPeer comments or have been retracted—both of which can indicate quality or integrity issues. The duplicate submissions detector can determine whether the same manuscript has been submitted to multiple journals by different publishers, often a sign of academic “paper mill” activity.

Following the success of the pilot, IEEE began working last year to expand the services to all its periodicals. It is anticipated that all IEEE periodicals will be included in the Integrity Hub screening by the end of this year.

Raising visibility

The team participated in industry-wide initiatives with STM. It also renewed membership in groups including the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the team continued its work sponsoring and presenting at conferences.

At a panel presentation during the Council of Science Editors annual meeting last year, Amanda Sulicz, manager of IEEE Research Integrity, participated in the Research Integrity Investigation panel session. She also presented at the Standardization of Publishing Integrity Norms and Corrective Actions poster session during the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s annual meeting, held 28 to 30 May 2025.

Luigi Longobardi, the IEEE Publishing Ethics and Conduct director, gave a presentation at the Communication and Collaboration With Institutions session during STM Innovation and Integrity Days, which took place 9 and 10 December.

IEEE was a sponsor of the National Conference on Research Integrity, held 20 to 22 May 2025, and the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, held 3 to 5 September.

Ethics reports

The team is responsible for tracking ethics-related complaints for all IEEE publications, including articles published in periodicals and conference proceedings. When complaints regarding an article’s integrity are received, either via email at pub-ethics@ieee.org or the anonymous ethics reporting line, the team works with IEEE volunteers to open a case, investigate the complaint, and resolve the matter.

Last year 591 cases were opened, a 56 percent increase over 2024. Of the 591 reports, 317 were closed and 274 are still under investigation. Of the complaints, 88 percent were research-related, including issues with plagiarism, AI-generated text, and falsification of—or unauthorized use of—data. The other 12 percent involved alleged misconduct by editors, reviewers, and conference organizers.

The complexity of the reported cases has expanded. An increasing number of the complaints deal with more than one article or complicated situations such as editorial misconduct or peer-review manipulation.

Conference publications

For the second consecutive year, the team participated in the joint IEEE Publication Services and Products Board/IEEE Conferences Committee’s ad hoc committee on conference publication quality. The committee is tasked with analyzing and reviewing problematic conference papers and enhancing quality screening of articles prior to publication to detect integrity issues such as plagiarism and tortured phrases. The committee also updates educational modules on organizing and managing conferences.

As part of the review process, the committee focused on conference articles that contained tortured phrases, which are nonstandard English expressions that are imprecise or erroneous and give the impression of technical jargon.

Many of the articles reviewed by the ad hoc committee were identified by the Problematic Paper Screener, a free online tool that uses application programming interfaces to screen papers published online for potentially problematic content, such as tortured phrases, machine-generated content (SCIgen or Mathgen, for example), or references to retracted content.

The ad hoc committee was responsible for reviewing and recommending the retraction of more than 1,700 problematic conference articles last year.

Case studies

From the cases the team reviewed, IEEE learned valuable information to help update its publishing policies and best practices.

Here are examples of two anonymized cases reported to the team last year.

from the double-dog-dare dept

I will admit it’s always a special kind of fun when a topic we cover here at Techdirt gets the John Oliver treatment. He and his writing team generally gets things right, which helps. And I’m not saying that Oliver and his crew are definitely Techdirt readers, but, well, hi John and crew!

Readers here will recall that I’ve spent the last year or so pointing out that famed gas station and/or supermarket chain, Buc-ee’s, has become the trademark bullying Monster Energy of gas stations. This is a company that doesn’t seem to understand what parody is, and which somehow believes that it alone owns the right to use a cartoon animal, or sometimes human, in a circular logo for any kind of related business to its own.

Well, Oliver dedicated a segment to Buc-ee’s bullying ways on his show this past week and he did not disappoint.

In recent years, it sued Super Fuels in Dallas, whose logo was a brown dog sporting a red cape, a drive-through liquor store in Missouri named Duckees featuring a cartoon duck wearing sunglasses, Choke Canyon Travel Center in Texas over its cartoon alligator wearing a cowboy hat, and Nut Huggers, an Oklahoma-based underwear company with a mascot of a squirrel.

Oliver accused the chain of “outright bullying,” noting that most of the stores have changed their logos because they do not have the resources to fight the Texas giant, which operates more than 50 stores.

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And that’s where the real fun starts.

Now, it would be absolutely stupid for Buc-ee’s to actually sue Oliver and HBO over this. The PR would be terrible, it would only give Oliver more attention and generate more headlines about the company being a trademark bully, and it would make the company look very thin-skinned and childish. I’m also relatively certain that’s exactly what will happen.

After all, any such lawsuit wouldn’t even rank in the top 3 of stupid trademark suits that Buc-ee’s has filed. And since they’ve demonstrated that they just can’t help themselves, I imagine we’re going to get more segments about this on Oliver’s show.

Filed Under: john oliver, trademark, trademark bullies

Companies: buc-ee’s, hbo

The AI boom needs colossal amounts of electricity. That has turned fusion, forever mocked as “30 years away,” into one of the hottest bets in tech. The best-funded player just raised another $1 billion.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based in Massachusetts, said the round takes its total to $4 billion, roughly 30% of all the money ever raised for fusion. It is the company’s biggest round since a $1.8 billion raise in 2021. The new backers are institutions: pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and infrastructure investors, which CFS declined to name.

The timing is not subtle. Tech firms are buying electricity at almost any price to feed AI data centres, and clean, round-the-clock power is scarce. CFS has already sold half the output of its first plant to Google. Fusion’s promise of limitless carbon-free energy suddenly has a rich, impatient customer.

The tell: a Moderna banker in the CFO seat

A quieter move may matter more. This week CFS hired Lorence Kim as chief financial officer. Kim ran finance at Moderna and took the biotech public in 2018. “Fusion today is where mRNA was a decade ago,” he wrote: “scientifically real, commercially yet-to-be-proven, and closer than the consensus thinks.”

TechCrunch reads the hire as a sign CFS could go public within two or three years, it reported. CFS says an IPO is not necessarily in the works. Either way, the race is on: rival General Fusion listed through a SPAC this month, and TAE Technologies is merging with Trump Media.

The science still has to work

The money is ahead of the physics. CFS builds tokamaks that use powerful magnets to squeeze plasma hot and dense enough to fuse. Its demonstration reactor, SPARC, aims to hit scientific breakeven in 2027, the point where a reaction gives off more energy than it takes to start. Only one machine, at Lawrence Livermore, has ever managed it.

In parallel, CFS is building ARC, a commercial plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia. It has applied to plug into PJM, the largest US power market, and lined up buyers: Google for 200 megawatts, and Italy’s Eni for more than $1 billion of electricity. It hopes to reach the grid in the early 2030s.

Plenty could still go wrong. Breakeven is not electricity, first-of-a-kind plants slip, and the 2030s are a long time to burn cash. But the AI data-centre boom is minting power buyers, and rival fusion startups are raising fast. CFS is betting the window to raise, and maybe to list, is open now, and it does not want to miss it.

SOFTWARE

A nice little summer job for someone

Teams mobile users now have even less time to update the app before older versions lose calendar access.

Microsoft originally set a late-October deadline in its message, but we’re guessing someone familiar with the impending demise of Exchange Web Services (EWS) had a quiet word. The date has been brought forward to the beginning of October, leaving users until the end of September to update the Teams mobile app.

The October deadline applies only to the iOS and Android apps. The web and desktop versions are unaffected.

Users with automatic updates enabled will probably receive a compatible version without doing anything. Managed devices are another matter, and administrators will need to ensure an updated Teams app is deployed, though we can’t imagine why they might hesitate to roll out one of Microsoft’s updates.

Microsoft has stern words for refuseniks: “Older versions will lose calendar access.”

“This change helps maintain a reliable calendar experience on iOS and Android devices and ensures compatibility with ongoing Teams service updates.”

Microsoft will begin disabling EWS in Exchange Online on October 1, 2026. The service stopped receiving feature updates in 2018, its retirement was announced in 2023, and Microsoft detailed the shutdown process earlier this year.

EWS allows applications to access mailboxes and other data in Exchange. It dates to 2007 and has proved popular with both integrators and miscreants, including those behind the Midnight Blizzard intrusion. Microsoft is understandably keen to shut it down.

EWS in on-premises Exchange Server is unaffected, but the Exchange Online version is heading for retirement. Administrators can re-enable it temporarily through a policy setting, but the plug will be pulled for good next year. At the time, Microsoft stated: “There will be no exceptions past April 2027.” ®

Less than a year after emerging from stealth to tackle non-human identity security, Israeli cybersecurity startup Hush Security believes the enterprise AI security conversation has fundamentally changed.

The company, which earlier this week announced a $30 million Series A round led by returning investors Battery Ventures and YL Ventures with Akamai Technologies joining as a strategic investor, argues that organizations are rapidly moving beyond experimenting with generative AI assistants and into deploying autonomous software agents that require an entirely different security model.

While the funding will help expand engineering, U.S. sales and enterprise integrations, Hush is framing the announcement primarily as evidence that identity—not models—is becoming the critical control plane for enterprise AI.

“The discussion has moved incredibly fast,” CEO and co-founder Micha Rave told VentureBeat in a video call interview following the funding news.

When Hush launched last year, the company’s focus was securing non-human identities—API keys, service accounts, machine credentials and other identities used by software rather than people.

Since then, Rave says, customers have increasingly asked a different question: how do they safely allow AI agents to operate inside production systems? This is a pertinent and urgent question ever since Hugging Face revealed in mid-July it was hacked by an autonomous AI agent, later identified as an OpenAI test agent running internally that escaped its secure sandbox, powered in part by an unreleased model.

According to Gartner figures cited by the company, the average Fortune 500 organization could be running more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, compared with fewer than 15 only a year earlier. Hush also points to Omdia research suggesting that 96% of organizations are relying on governance models that were never designed for autonomous AI agents.

From machine identities to autonomous software

The company’s original thesis was that enterprises had accumulated thousands of long-lived machine credentials that were difficult to rotate, audit and secure. Rather than relying on static secrets, Hush developed an identity-based system that brokers short-lived, policy-driven access for machines.

Rave says AI agents amplify that same problem.

“Software now acts autonomously, on its own initiative, inside your most sensitive systems,” he said. “AI agents need strict identity, not just API keys.”

Unlike traditional automation, AI agents frequently act across multiple enterprise systems, invoke external services, make decisions independently and often execute actions using the permissions of the human who launched them. In practice, organizations often grant an agent broad OAuth permissions or administrator credentials simply to enable it to complete tasks.

That creates what Hush describes as an identity problem rather than simply an AI problem.

During the interview, Rave said virtually every security leader he speaks with faces the same dilemma: either slow AI adoption until appropriate controls exist or allow employees to connect new agents directly into corporate systems despite limited governance.

“The answer,” he said, “is that they let everything in. You cannot stop innovation in the name of security.”

Identity becomes the control point

Rather than treating AI agents as another application requiring credentials, Hush is extending its existing non-human identity platform into what it calls an “Identity Gateway” for AI agents.

The platform sits between agents and enterprise resources, allowing organizations to discover agents, assign each one its own identity, associate it with a responsible human owner, broker task-specific permissions at runtime and maintain centralized audit logs.

Instead of allowing an agent to inherit all of a user’s privileges indefinitely, Hush attempts to enforce what it calls “least agency”—granting only the permissions necessary for the specific task being executed.

The company says every action can be logged, attributed and revoked from a single control plane, while administrators retain the ability to terminate an agent’s access immediately if necessary.

This represents a broader shift in enterprise identity management. Human identities have long been governed through identity providers, single sign-on and privileged access management systems. Machine identities have increasingly received similar attention as organizations modernized cloud infrastructure. Hush argues autonomous AI agents now represent a third identity category requiring dedicated governance.

Hush has not publicly posted its pricing for the Identity Gateway solution, nor its offerings more generally. But the company did release a Free plan that gives organizations access to runtime visibility for AI agents and non-human identities, risk analysis, and identity-based access controls intended to replace long-lived credentials, with no credit card or time limit required.

Governing every kind of enterprise agent

Hush says enterprises are no longer dealing with a single category of AI software.

During the interview, Rave described three broad classes emerging inside organizations:

• Desktop coding assistants and productivity agents such as Claude, Cursor and VS Code integrations.

• Enterprise AI platform agents running on services such as Microsoft Foundry, Salesforce Agentforce or AWS AgentCore.

• Custom agents organizations build internally for business processes or customer-facing applications.

Each introduces different governance challenges, but all ultimately require controlled access to enterprise systems.

The problem, according to Hush, is that many agents currently authenticate using inherited human credentials or long-lived API keys, making it difficult to determine whether an action originated from a person or from an autonomous system acting on that person’s behalf.

“If I see something in the Salesforce logs,” Rave said during the interview, “did the user do that, or was it the agent the user was using?”

That attribution challenge becomes increasingly significant as organizations begin deploying multiple autonomous systems capable of initiating actions without direct human approval.

Existing identity tools weren’t designed for AI agents

Rather than replacing identity providers or secrets managers, Hush positions itself as filling a gap between them.

Traditional IAM platforms authenticate employees. Secrets managers store credentials. Neither, the company argues, governs the runtime behavior of autonomous software acting on behalf of humans across multiple systems.

Hush says its platform continuously discovers known and shadow agents across enterprise environments, assigns ownership, brokers just-in-time credentials and records every interaction in a centralized audit trail. According to its product documentation, organizations do not need to modify their existing agents because the platform operates by brokering access requests rather than changing application logic.

That identity-first approach is attracting customers already deploying enterprise AI initiatives.

IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl says it has deployed Hush internally and has begun offering the platform to enterprise customers.

“Our collaboration with Hush is rooted in a shared security philosophy: identity is the ultimate control point for the modern agentic workforce,” said Adeel Saeed, senior vice president and CTO for Global Cyber Resiliency at Kyndryl, in a prepared statement.

Akamai’s participation in the funding round similarly reflects what the company sees as an architectural rather than incremental shift.

“AI agents are driving the next transformation, and identity is the piece most companies haven’t solved yet,” said Ramanath Iyer, Akamai’s chief strategist.

Security priorities are moving beyond the model itself

The broader AI security market has spent the past two years focused largely on prompt injection, model vulnerabilities, jailbreaks and LLM safety. Those remain active research areas, but enterprise deployments increasingly face operational questions around what autonomous systems are permitted to access and how those actions can be governed.

Hush argues that identity is becoming the enforcement layer for answering those questions.

Rather than asking whether an AI model can safely generate code or summarize documents, enterprises increasingly need to determine which systems an agent may access, whose authority it exercises, how permissions are delegated, and how every action can be traced back to an accountable owner.

Whether Hush’s identity-centric approach becomes the dominant model remains to be seen. But as enterprises move from experimenting with AI assistants to deploying thousands of autonomous software agents, the company is betting that the next major security challenge won’t be securing the models themselves—it will be securely managing the identities of the software acting on their behalf.

from the real-keystone-cops-shit dept

Earlier this week we noted how the Trump administration’s unpopular ban on Chinese drones had become a crony capitalist mess, with Brendan Carr and his FCC struggling to fine or ban companies for violations. The ban is a stupid, protectionist mess that has far more to do with coddling the president’s sons’ drone investments than it does protecting national security or consumer privacy.

Right on queue, The Verge has an interesting feature on just how easy it has been for some companies to bypass the FCC restrictions. The Trump ban was supposed to encourage drone makers to create devices here in the U.S.; but instead companies are simply setting up the laziest fake companies in the U.S, and the Trump FCC appears too short-handed or incompetent to notice.

So the over-arching impact of the ban has been to create a flood of new companies selling popular DJI-made Chinese drones under a litany of new names. They don’t try very hard to disguise them:

“When software developer and journalist Konrad Iturbe began watching FCC databases for those frequencies, he realized that DJI was preparing to play a grand game of Whac-A-Mole in the United States. Well ahead of the December 2025 drone ban, a host of new companies had suddenly appeared selling barely disguised versions of DJI technology. He dubbed them “DJI front companies.”

To pretend these drones are made in the U.S., the companies use fake U.S. front locations to pretend that the drones are assembled here. Again, they’re not trying very hard to disguise them, and most could have been unearthed with basic Google searches:

“But it’s easier than that. Odyssey Robot declared that its drone was designed, developed, and manufactured at 21 Miller Alley Suite 210 in Pasadena, California. Even a basic Google search can show you that’s not the address of a factory — it’s a coworking space called Industrious that explicitly prohibits members from manufacturing anything onsite.

Odyssey Robot also declared that its drones are assembled at eTak Worldwide Corporation in Grand Prairie, Texas. With 80,000 square feet of warehouse space and 15 loading docks, you could theoretically build drones there. But again, a basic Google search would show you that eTak isn’t an assembler; it’s a recycling company that collects e-waste, including old batteries, then sorts and dismantles them.”

Like most of what Trump does, none of this appears thought out very well, and the administration isn’t competent enough to even do basic investigations to enforce its own restrictions. And like elsewhere in the administration, Trumpism rejoices at the idea of dismantling regulators; then throws these weird sorts of complicated demands in their lap expecting productive outcomes.

Again, in a functional world, you’d allow Chinese companies to do business in the United States, but you’d fund, staff, and legally empower your regulators to strictly enforce competition, labor, environmental, and consumer protections. Because that would result in U.S. companies making less money and having to try harder, we instead get this weird jumbled tangle of corruption and buffoonery.

The primary justification for the Trump Chinese drone ban is that these devices pose meaningful privacy and national security risks. But there’s been absolutely no evidence presented by the administration supporting this allegation. There is, however, ample proof that administration greed, corruption, and incompetence has been indistinguishable from a foreign attack.

Filed Under: ban, chinese, drones, fcc, hardware, made in the U.S., trump

Companies: dji